y Andrea Useem
Special to The Examiner
Nearly a hundred Library of Congress employees packed a small conference room Monday, giving up their lunch hour to sit straight in their chairs, relax their hands and let go of their preoccupations.
“Imagine yourself melting from ice to water,” said Tara Brach, a meditation teacher, as silverware rattled in the distance. “Let those sounds come and go – like your thoughts.”
Brach’s one-hour talk and guided meditation was part of Meditate DC, a host of events offered this week to introduce local residents to “mindfulness” practices and mark the visit of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader. But area religious leaders say meditation is not just for Buddhists.
“Meditation has been gaining interest in recent years because it’s not necessarily hitched to any religion,” said Brach, whose Wednesday night classes at the Insight Meditation Community in Bethesda draw 300 people from various faiths.
Brach, a clinical psychologist and author trained in several Buddhist traditions, said that people often seek out meditation when suffering from an extreme stress, such as chronic illness, and “have tried everything else.” Others simply “intuit a deep potential within themselves to live more fully,” said Brach.
The community, which Brach founded in 1998, is just one of 19 area organizations organizing and supporting Meditate DC, which has events continuing through this weekend.
Event organizers said they were inspired by the “unprecedented” participation of the Dalai Lama – Buddhism’s best-known spiritual leader in the West – in a three-day international conference, ending today, which is exploring the scientific and clinical applications of meditation.
Scientists, psychologists and other experts have gathered alongside the Tibetan leader for the “Investigating the Mind” conference, co-hosted by the Mind and Life Institute, the Georgetown University Medical Center and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Many people in the area could benefit from meditation, said Hugh Byrne, a co-founder of the Washington Buddhist Peace Fellowship and a member of the Meditate DC steering committee.
“It’s so easy to get caught up in the busyness and stress of our lives, particularly here in D.C., where there is such a drive to achieve and succeed,” said Byrne. “We lock up a lot of tension in our minds and bodies. Meditation is a way to recognize that stress – and let go of it.”
Many area Buddhists temples have not been directly involved in Meditate DC, but they are supportive of the effort to share meditation with the general public, said Bill Aiken, director public affairs for Soka Gakkai, an international Buddhist organization with a large community center in Mount Rainier.
“It’s possible to take meditation out of the Buddhist context,” said Aiken. “It’s not a religious Trojan horse.”
Not everyone seems to agree. Yann Leu, a meditation practitioner who organized the lunchtime event at the Library of Congress, said many of the posters advertising the event were removed by Christian colleagues who objected to it.
But Christian and Jewish leaders involved in Meditate DC say contemplative practices are an authentic part of their own religious traditions.
“Meditation is a time-honored ancient Christian practice,” said Eugene Sutton, canon pastor at the Washington National Cathedral and director of the Cathedral Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage.
“Many Christians think that all prayer means talking to God. But prayer can be ‘the laying aside of thoughts,’ ” said Sutton, quoting a fourth-century monk.
Twice a week at the cathedral center, Sutton leads fellow Christians in the “centering prayer” practice developed by Father Thomas Keating. Worshippers choose a single sacred word and then sit in silence for 20 minutes “with the sole intention of consenting to God’s presence,” he said.
Interest in mindfulness practices is also growing among Jewish people – and they need not look beyond their own religious tradition, said Rabbi David Schneyer, founder and spiritual leader of Am Kolel, a Jewish renewal center in Rockville.
“The Sabbath itself is day of meditation and reflection,” said Schneyer. Am Kolel’s Sabbath service this Saturday in Bethesda will include meditation and other mindfulness practices.
Schneyer himself uses a meditation first developed by Aryeh Kaplan, an influential Orthodox rabbi, that focuses attention on the four Hebrew consonants of God’s biblical name (usually enunciated by Christians as “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”).
“I inhale on the first letter and exhale on the second letter. It is like breathing in the divine,” said Schneyer.
“There is nothing in Judaism opposed to meditation,” he said. “It is simply a prayerful practice that helps us find a truer relationship with the source of our being.”
